Ventana Research founder Mark Smith was less sanguine about the convergence
of BI and BPM, noting that while BPM software has value, most corporations
weren't built on business processes.

"The challenge with process management is that it makes good common
business sense, but most corporations aren't designed or managed by process,
right?" Smith said. "It's not because they're doing the wrong thing, it's
because companies aren't mature enough to manage their business by process."

Smith wants to know where the evidence is that the market for BPM software,
estimated by researcher IDC to top $1 billion just two years ago, is picking up.

Sure, there have been several acquisitions in the BPM space -- Oracle bought
Collaxa, BEA nabbed
Fuego and Sofware AG recently targeted
webMethods -- but Smith wants to know what fruits these buys have borne.

"The reality is, I haven't seen anyone hitting a homerun selling BPM
systems," Smith said. "But I think there is a lot of potential around
applying analytics to BPM is important to get more intelligence around
processes, activities and events."

And the BPM market certainly has some momentum. Cordys, of The Netherlands,
recently set up shop on U.S. soil and ingested
an $80 million round of funding to help further its fortunes in North
America, where it has been scarcely competitive. It must be upgraded season
for BPM because
Progress, Savvion, MetaStorm and Lombardi have all enhanced their platforms.

But is the BPM market going to subsume the standalone BI market?

"It is not going to subsume the BI marketplace -- there are different sets of
buyers and requirements," Smith said. "BPM vendors have to deal with a
'hurry up and wait' market and prove themselves by finding companies willing to
adopt it.

Yet Forrester's Evelson remains convinced that Tibco-Spotfire is not a
one-off deal.

"While this was a relatively small transaction, I am predicting/hoping that
there will be a more impactful move next, potentially coming from BEA
acquiring a larger BI vendor," Evelson wrote on his blog.

BEA Executive Vice President and CTO Rob Levy refused to comment on the
acquisition speculation. He does, however, see value in sprinkling BI in the
BPM mix, eventually creating a new software category.

"I think with SOA, we're going to see a new type of BI," Levy said. "Let's
call it dynamic event-based BI, where the information is running through the
system in real time, processed through the BPM engine, analyzed in some sort
of event-processing business engine activity where it correlates an
inference and creates an event out of that."